


Perfectly Imperfect

by OMHypothesis



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Demon!Moriarty, Demons, F/M, God!Mycroft, Gods, John is a human, M/M, Moriarty is Mary, Sherlock Loves John, Sherlock is a supernatural being, god!Sherlock, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 13:19:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4306581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OMHypothesis/pseuds/OMHypothesis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Immortals inevitably go mad from boredom on Earth.  Sherlock staves off madness by immersing himself in the study of humans -- and that's when he finds John.  </p><p>Not betaed, not britpicked.  Just a one-shot in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfectly Imperfect

Sherlock had never been very interested in the supernatural. It bored him. 

Oh, he was not an unbeliever, no, on the contrary: purported supernormal activity bored him because he was intimately familiar with the workings of gods and devils, angels and souls. He was a member of the trapped, a being unfortunately caught in the necrotizing confines of the “Earthly” plane, and all the little ghosts and poltergeists, ectoplasm and echoes from the beyond, bored him entirely stiff. Most of what humans saw as paranormal was actually far more interesting than the real thing, because it was born of human machination. The real thing was just… reality, painfully expanding itself into a flat world. 

Gods became demons because Earth decayed things. It was the nature of this plane to cycle through, to provide energy for the change of life with the finality of death. Immortal beings didn’t thrive in this medium; they were built to last, and the constant erosion of death and strife and struggle made them into monsters. Sherlock knew this, knew that after eons of enduring the wheel of human time, he too would seek to ally himself with death and destruction rather than principle. But in these first few centuries, wasn’t it grand? 

The bloom of fascination hadn’t faded for him yet. He’d only been here a few moments. His brother — if you would call him that — Mycroft, had been on Earth for 800 years and was just beginning his inevitable descent into the chess game of fate. Sherlock could see it in his ruthlessness, his increasingly frequent disregard for individual human life. Sherlock supposed it was only logical. Life, after all, was so ordinary here, and Mycroft’s relative uniqueness warped him as it would warp them all. 

Sherlock still took joy in watching rather than meddling. Humans had so many flaws and foibles. The contrast was delicious. The struggle to maintain all the trappings of life - food, shelter, a feeling of purpose — had evolved in men over the millennia into a strange society, a complex balance of interpersonal needs that still had to remain flexible enough to tolerate individual aggressions. Sherlock took great pleasure in delving into the minds of deviants, teasing out the innate desires that came into conflict with the requirements of the whole, the heuristics and passions that seemed so understandable in one individual, so common to man as to be negligible, but when put against the hive-mind became problematic. It was a lovely sort of mathematics, was crime-solving. 

Humans were so common. There were billions of them. They were all basically built from the same blueprints, but tiny imperfections led them to live out a near infinity of iterations. Only the truly bored immortals would seek to add new variables to the equation. 

Some humans, of course, deviated enough from the norm as to be exceptional in their own way. When Sherlock had first become trapped on Earth, he had met one he thought worthy of special attention. This human did not radiate genius or divine artistry in any way, it was just that he was so entirely good. Dr. Watson had been such a righteous and upright creature that no manner of hardship he endured was able to introduce in him a particle of true malice, and a relatively young Sherlock had found that beautiful. 

Sherlock had kept Watson near him for as long as his cyclical life would allow, aging with him as humans do until the good doctor’s soul had departed for whatever place human souls went to when they left Earth. Trapped as he was by his very nature, Sherlock could not follow, and so he began anew for the first time. Alone.  
———————

This cycle marked the first time period where Sherlock was truly bored. 

Once again born, in the way of men, and once again paired with Mycroft (who he suspected of maudlin attachment in his middle age), Sherlock whiled away his first few decades of this wheel-turn playing with the physics of the world. While laughably simple, they were at least elegant, and Sherlock felt that a good sense of play was the secret to youth. 

He played his way through university, where he met a young man named Victor who had some measure of genius but no true uniqueness. Victor’s brilliance was enough to keep him vaguely amused for a time, and Victor’s consistent stash of modern cocaine was certainly fun. Sherlock experimented with his human transport until Mycroft appeared, looking dour and bitter, and sobered him up. 

“Vice corrupts,” Mycroft told him, and that warning was enough to keep Sherlock clean. He didn’t, after all, want to become a demon before his time. Instead he fell back on old habits. He befriended (after a fashion) an up-and-coming police inspector by the name of Lestrade, and began solving crimes again. As London’s population had increased in diversity, so did the nature and complexity of the crimes he solved, and Sherlock felt himself reasonably contented.

Even if the bright edge of humanity had dulled. Even if Sherlock felt, increasingly, the outside pressure of immortality begin to harden him. 

How soon was too soon to give in? Sherlock found himself wondering this as his transport fiddled with teratogens in the lab of St. Barts. Mycroft seemed determined to keep his younger brother in a kind of infancy, but after a few thousand years, would it even matter? They would be equally disillusioned then, with only themselves or other mad gods as equals. 

That was when Mike Stamford brought his friend up to be introduced, and Sherlock’s thoughts were swept away in an agony of wonder. 

——————

“It’s happened before,” Mycroft told him. “Reincarnation. You see it enough over the years that even humans have noticed the phenomenon.” 

And oh! Wasn’t that fascinating, wasn’t that lovely, but Sherlock was still fixated on watching John Watson move through the world. This form of him was a little darker, a little more cautious with the soul that shone through his eyes, as if some part of him remembered what it was to feel the losses of age and death. Even that, however, had not changed the fundamental deviance of him. He was still intrinsically good, with no hint of evil. 

Sherlock watched him shoot the serial-killer cabbie through two windows and his transport trembled all over with joy. 

Add another mystery — Moriarty — and Sherlock felt as though boredom had never been farther away.

———————-

Moriarty was a demon. 

He was the same demon, in fact, that had condescended to play with Sherlock in his first era. Sherlock found himself flattered and amused by Moriarty’s overtures, and played the game with gusto. 

It was tempting, perhaps, to give in to this unsubtle seduction. Sherlock knew through Mycroft that the millennia ahead would be cold and mindless without action, and the idea of another equal, a partner in the time to come was comforting. Moriarty had clearly had eons to hone and craft his coping mechanisms. He was so far into the Wheel that he made Sherlock and Mycroft look like babes in the wood. 

Sherlock toyed with texting him. “Call me when I’m older,” seemed sufficiently coy. After all, right now he had John, and the cases still amused him, and London was a delightfully diverting shelter, but in 70 years or so John would be gone again and Sherlock would need a distraction.

For the finale of their little game, Moriarty stole John and strapped a bomb to his torso. Fury Sherlock had never known rolled through his chest, and he decided then and there that even if he stayed on Earth till the sun burnt to cinders, he would never be Jim Moriarty’s ally. 

Moriarty saw it in his face, and smiled a slyly, as if he knew something Sherlock did not. 

Then John grabbed the demon and cried, “Sherlock, run!” and both of them were so startled that the game came to an abrupt and fizzling end. 

———————

The Earthly plane was one of cycles, and Sherlock found himself fascinated by how similar this one was to the one he’d shared with John Watson before. 

John had become the winning piece in Moriarty’s game, so that no matter how much he longed to refuse, Sherlock had to play. Once again the two Gods fell, once again Sherlock rose to take down the last pawns before he could return to his human. 

Once again he returned to find John married, although this time “Mary’s” eyes gleamed with a hint of hellfire. 

“I won. Give him back,” Sherlock hissed. “Mary” bit into an apple, amused.

“He loves me,” she said simply, and Sherlock shuddered and let his head drop into his hands. 

John’s faintly uneven tread sounded on the stair and Mary’s voice lowered. “Honestly, how did I miss this before?” she wondered. “He’s so…” 

“If you think you can break him, you’re wrong,” Sherlock interrupted, hating how it sounded like a challenge.

“I don’t want to break him,” scoffed Moriarty. “Not this time.” 

————————

“Why didn’t you come back sooner?” John whispered. Sherlock shook tilted his head on the thin hospital pillow. Why indeed? 

“It will be hard to leave her,” John told him, beginning to weep, and the heart within Sherlock’s transport thudded against his ribs like a kick. “But God help me, I…” 

“What, John?” Sherlock whispered. 

“I love you more,” said John, and kissed him.

———————

Mary fell mysteriously pregnant the moment John tried to break away. Sherlock ached with an unholy pain for two weeks while John struggled with the blast. 

This would be the moment. This would the the compromise that stripped John’s soul of its purity and left it vulnerable to the dark, he was certain. And then… 

“I’m sorry,” John told her. “I will always love you, and I will love our baby, but I cannot live a lie.”

“You made a promise to me,” hissed Moriarty. 

“I made it without all the facts,” John told her. “And I don’t… I don’t think you did, Mary.” 

Moriarty glared at him. 

“You knew I loved him,” John said slowly. “You knew that and married me anyway. And when he came back…”

“I shot him,” Moriarty relented. 

“I’m still having a bit of trouble with that really,” John sighed.

“I knew it wouldn’t kill him!” Moriarty groused. “You people get so hung up on these things.” 

John looked as if he had been slapped, then rose from his seat. “Oh, don’t go,” Moriarty said with some alarm. “I love you terribly,” she continued. “Don’t you know how rare that is?”

“I… don’t,” John said, nonplussed. “I guess I don’t know you as well as I thought I did. But it doesn’t matter. I can’t do this anymore.” 

Moriarty watched her funny little human walk away from their flat, and dialed Sherlock. Modern cellphones really were a revolution. “You win this time,” s/he announced. 

“Excellent,” Sherlock’s baritone replied. “Now go away.”  
“Dibs on the next cycle,” Moriarty trilled and hung up, but not before hearing Sherlock’s indrawn breath.

————————

Sex with John was different than sex with any other human lover. It produced the same delightful flurry of data, but this time each data point was meaningful. It was personal. 

“You alright?” John smiled up at him from where his head was pillowed on Sherlock’s hip. From the way Sherlock’s transport was shuddering and gasping, he supposed it was a legitimate question. 

Sherlock was thinking once again about the end of the Earth, but this time he was thinking that even millions of years later, when everything had gone dark and cold, he would remember the feel of John’s shiver when he put his lips to the nape of that tawny neck. When this universe failed and all the planes collapsed into one, and there were no more gods or demons, the beauty of being encased in John’s body would remain. The music of his human moans would endure beyond all finality. 

“Perfect,” he gasped.


End file.
